Implementing a per-episode prospective payment system (PPS) for home health services is one option for Medicare policy makers facing rapid increases in service use and expenditures. Analysis of data on recent episodes of Medicare home health care identified systematic differences in service patterns across provider types; these indicate potential differences in the capacity of agencies of diffe...

(i) There is a delay by the intermediary in making payment to the SNF. (ii) Due to an exceptional situation, there is a temporary delay in the SNF’s preparation and submittal of bills to the intermediary beyond its normal billing cycle. (2) Approval of payment. An SNF’s request for an accelerated payment must be approved by the intermediary and HCFA. (3) Amount of payment. The amount of the acc...

Today, prepaid cards are used in dozens of payment applications. To examine the most recent developments, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia hosted a workshop on August 22, 2011. Leading the workshop was Tim Walsh, president and chief executive officer of Ready Credit Corporation, a firm that developed network-branded prepaid cards for use in transit-fare syste...

This paper proposes an episode of care payment system for patients with chronic illnesses, extending earlier published work on this model of ambulatory care (Duckett and Jackson 1993). The payment system relies on annual voluntary enrollment and some marginal broadening of Medicare coverage in exchange for patients' willingness to participate in an ambulatory managed care arrangement. In the co...

Background: The excessive prescription of benzodiazepines (BZD) has long been considered a worldwide public health issue. Despite the existence large body literature regarding interventions to change BZD patterns, most fail report significant or long-term effects. Objective: To study effect implementation Digital Behaviour Change Intervention (DBCI) online platform – named ePrimaPrescribe on pa...